(Steven Soderbergh, 2025, UK, 100 minutes)
Someday, everything is gonna be diff’rent
When I paint my masterpiece
–Bob Dylan (1971)
The Christophers is a film about art and commerce, and the ways in which they're at cross purposes. It's also Steven Soderbergh's second London film in a row after last year's stylish Black Bag with Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett as married intelligence officers, and the city suits him well.
Granted, the two films don't have much in common, other than that they aim to keep you guessing from start to finish, except the former is a romantic thriller, in the vein of 1998's Out of Sight, whereas The Christophers isn't a thriller at all, though it doesn't lack for low-key thrills.
Lori Butler (Michaela Cole, whose sculptural face is a work of art), an exacting woman in her thirties, works as a food cart vendor. She isn't miserable necessarily, but her life hasn't turned out the way she imagined.
Sallie (Baby Reindeer's Jessica Gunning) and her brother, Barnaby (a perfectly-cast James Corden in a ridiculous patchwork shirt), would like her to complete The Christophers, their elderly father's famously unfinished third series of paintings under that name. Completed canvases in the previous series have sold exceptionally well, and this one will be worth even more after he kicks the bucket. They describe it as a restoration job--Lori has a sideline in art restoration--except they're really asking her to engage in forgery. They figure she won't mind, since he once humiliated her in public.
Their father, Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen in top form) is retired and in declining health, so they plan to pass Lori off as an assistant, so she can gain access to The Christophers and finish them using his original paints and brushes. They neglect to tell her that he can't stand them, and considering that they see him primarily as a flesh-and-blood ATM machine, it isn't hard to see why (to be fair, he also appears to have been a pretty lousy father).
While Lori lives in shared housing with other struggling artists, Julian lives in two side-by-side walk-ups in Fitzrovia filled with art and the detritus of a long life. When they first meet, he doesn't appear to remember her from their long-ago encounter. In fact, it's unclear whether he's eccentric or suffering from dementia. He's sharp in some ways, less so in others.
Lori makes herself useful, though she finds him exhausting. He's so verbose and inappropriately revealing, she can't get in a word in edgewise, though she soaks up every detail. The actors generate a palpable friction, while the characters have only their passion for art in common. That's about it. The tension isn't about age or race, but sensibility, since she's a 21st-century woman, while he clings to the politically-incorrect norms of the past.
In a way, though, they're both acting. As Ed Solomon's twisty screenplay continues, he doles out more and more details about two people who aren't as different from each other as they at first appear. Not least because Julian isn't as oblivious as he seems; he's also convinced that his kids had an ulterior motive in hiring Lori. He's not sure what it is, but he suspects that it involves The Christophers, so when he asks her to burn them in the firepit, it's hard to tell if he's testing her--to see if she'll resist--or whether he simply wants them out of his life for reasons that will be revealed later.
In a manner of speaking, the film is a cat and mouse game, because Lori and Julian's goals are at cross purposes, though they both prove pretty proficient at subterfuge. It's one of the film’s biggest strengths: they're intelligent people, and Solomon, who wrote Soderbergh's terrific Detroit gangster picture No Sudden Move, assumes you are, too. Granted, he's also known for Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and Men in Black, and there's plenty of snap and crackle to the screwball-adjacent dialogue.
Solomon also doesn't believe in giving everything away. Julian had a wife and children at a time when many gay men, even those in London's artistic demimonde, lived outwardly as heterosexuals (prior to 1967's Sexual Offences Act, homosexuality was essentially illegal in the UK). He considers it a badge of pride that he was a bisexual "when that meant something," though I suspect he was as "bisexual" as Elton John in the 1970s, i.e. not very. We never find out Lori's sexual orientation. And nor does it matter.
Lori's feelings about art matter more, and over the years, she went from being a Julian admirer to a critic as he squandered his talent, but at least he had some, whereas she specializes in convincingly copying other artists. It's a skill to be sure, but it isn't exactly art--even by her own standards.
For all their differences, though, they're lonely in their own unique ways, but not enough to admit that they would rather have a worthy opponent with whom to spar than an assortment of unworthies. If they never become friends in the conventional sense, they become something just as valuable.
Wikipedia describes The Christophers as a black comedy. I wouldn't, though the back-and-forth is frequently quite funny, and rarely in an obvious way. Sometimes Coel, who plays a fairly humorless character, gets a laugh simply by the way Lori reacts--or doesn't react--to her employer's shameless proclamations and his children's slippery prevarications. Her performance here is nothing like the work she did in her brightly-hued council estate comedy Chewing Gum, though never as dark as anything in I May Destroy You, her Emmy Award-winning exploration into life after sexual assault.
As different as those characters and those projects were, I would imagine Coel wrote them to her strengths–Chewing Gum was an extension of her 2012 one-woman play–whereas in the case of The Christophers, she excels as a once-promising artist stuck in as much of a rut as her 86-year-old sort-of mentor, though I don't believe Solomon wrote the role with her in mind.
And I don't know if he wrote Julian with Ian McKellen in mind, but it's hard to imagine anyone else in the role, since he gets to use most every color in his considerable paintbox. It's been over a decade since I last saw him on the screen--in Bill Condon's touching Mr. Holmes--so he looks older than I remember, but there's a delightful sequence towards the end in which he rubs his hands together and skips about with glee, and I was reminded that he once appeared as a jaunty vampire in a Pet Shop Boys video.
By the end of the film, which never feels too stagey thanks to Soderbergh's deft direction and fluid camera work--as alter ego Peter Andrews--I was reminded of two other British two-handers, Harold Pinter's adaptation of Robin Maugham's The Servant and Ronald Harwood's The Dresser, even if this relationship isn't quite that antagonistic, though similar differentials are at play involving income and status (and McKellen appeared with Anthony Hopkins in Richard Eyre's BBC version of The Dresser in 2015).
The Christophers, however, isn't a tragedy. Sometimes a younger person can serve as a mentor as effectively as an older one, and sometimes the most challenging relationships can prove the most beneficial; the kind in which another person forces you to face the thing you least want to face--the thing you most need to face--and that will set you free in the end.
Once upon a time I assumed, like Lori, that I would become a professional artist. It didn't happen. I had bills to pay, and art wasn't going to get the job done. It doesn't happen for many people, but it made me particular about how art and artists are represented on screen, and Soderbergh's film, by way of Solomon's screenplay--as embodied by two terrific actors--is one of the best I've seen about the challenges and satisfactions of a life in art.
The Christophers opens at AMC Alderwood Mall on Sun, April 12, and SIFF Cinema Uptown on Thurs, April 16. Images from Blex Media (Ian McKellen and Michaela Coel), Film Streams (Jessica Gunning and James Corden), First Showing (McKellen) and Rotten Tomatoes (McKellen and Coel).
